You are a human animal. You are a very special breed, or you are the only animal, who can think,

who can reason, who can read. Hi, this is Michael Silverblad, and this is Bookworm.

I'm here today with John O'Brien and Evelyn Sullivan.

John O'Brien edits the Dalkey Archive Press,

a small but very important American press

dedicated to the publishing of a certain kind of playful writing full of puzzles and games that some people might call obscure.

One of the books he's recently published is Evelyn Sullivan's The Dead Magician.

Evelyn's come down from Northern California, where she teaches at Stanford,

and I thought we'd begin talking to her on this issue about the kind of literary puzzles that go on in the books.

The Ulipo, for those who don't know, is a French school of writers who devise novels

according to certain rules. Among the Ulipo writers are Raymond Keno, but more famous to us,

Italo Calvino. In America, we have Harry Matthews, who wrote Truth, The Conversions, the Sinking of the Odredeck Stadium, and most recently cigarettes.

I'd been having dinner with Harry, and I said, Harry, why won't you show us the internal plan of one of these books?

If you truly want this kind of literary tradition

to exist in America, the readers have to be courted, and after all, Nabokov did in the British

Penguin edition of Ada, include at the end of the book by Vivian Darkbloom, an anagram of

Vladimir Nabokov. He gave a list of trilingual puns, of secret references. He let the book

open a bit to invite the readers in. He knew, perhaps, that it was to be his best book, and he was making

a generous, uncharacteristic gift to readers. I guess in this century, this kind of thing

begins with Joyce, with Finnegan's Wake, but why not an explanatory essay or even the examination of a particular

sample corpse just so we would see what these operations are like, Evelyn?

Well, I don't see anything intrinsically wrong with doing something like that.

...